Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese ...
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Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.Less

The Aesthetics of Strangeness : Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

W. Puck Brecher

Published in print: 2013-08-31

Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.

Who are the people of the Ryukyu Islands? How could they survive and prosper on small, isolated islands? How did the independent Ryukyu Kingdom become a major player in East Asian medieval trade? ...
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Who are the people of the Ryukyu Islands? How could they survive and prosper on small, isolated islands? How did the independent Ryukyu Kingdom become a major player in East Asian medieval trade? This book explores 30,000 years of human occupation in the Ryukyu Islands, from the earliest human presence in the region up to AD 1609 and the emergence of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It focuses on the unique geopolitical position of the islands, their environment, and the many human communities whose historical activities can be discerned. The book describes explorers and sojourners and colonists who arrived thousands of years ago, and their ancient trade links to Japan, Korea, and China. Through a case study focused on the medieval castles and palaces of the Ryukyu Kingdom, it demonstrates the vigorous trade taking place in East Asia before the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century AD It also shows how archaeologists have sought to reconstruct monuments on Okinawa Island that were obliterated in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The book shows that many modern features of the culture, politics, and economy of the Ryukyu Islands have very deep roots. It concludes with a discussion of aspects of Ryukyu archaeology that are significant for world archaeology and the archaeology of islands.Less

Ancient Ryukyu : An Archaeological Study of Island Communities

Richard Pearson

Published in print: 2013-11-30

Who are the people of the Ryukyu Islands? How could they survive and prosper on small, isolated islands? How did the independent Ryukyu Kingdom become a major player in East Asian medieval trade? This book explores 30,000 years of human occupation in the Ryukyu Islands, from the earliest human presence in the region up to AD 1609 and the emergence of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It focuses on the unique geopolitical position of the islands, their environment, and the many human communities whose historical activities can be discerned. The book describes explorers and sojourners and colonists who arrived thousands of years ago, and their ancient trade links to Japan, Korea, and China. Through a case study focused on the medieval castles and palaces of the Ryukyu Kingdom, it demonstrates the vigorous trade taking place in East Asia before the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century AD It also shows how archaeologists have sought to reconstruct monuments on Okinawa Island that were obliterated in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The book shows that many modern features of the culture, politics, and economy of the Ryukyu Islands have very deep roots. It concludes with a discussion of aspects of Ryukyu archaeology that are significant for world archaeology and the archaeology of islands.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century ...
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In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama and includes translations of representative one-act plays. The book looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theatre (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested. Following introductory chapters on the development of Japanese drama from the 1880s to the early 1930s, are translations of nine seminal one-act plays by nine dramatists, including two women, Okada Yachiyo and Hasegawa Shigure. The subject matter of these plays is that of modern drama everywhere: discord between men and women, between parents and children, and the resulting disintegration of marriages and families. Realism prevails as the mode of modernity, but other styles are presented: the symbolism of brittle melodrama, minimalistic lyricism, politically incisive expressionism, and a proto-absurdist work by Japan's master of prewar drama, Kishida Kunio.Less

A Beggar's Art : Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930

M. Cody Poulton

Published in print: 2010-05-31

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. This book examines the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama and includes translations of representative one-act plays. The book looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theatre (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested. Following introductory chapters on the development of Japanese drama from the 1880s to the early 1930s, are translations of nine seminal one-act plays by nine dramatists, including two women, Okada Yachiyo and Hasegawa Shigure. The subject matter of these plays is that of modern drama everywhere: discord between men and women, between parents and children, and the resulting disintegration of marriages and families. Realism prevails as the mode of modernity, but other styles are presented: the symbolism of brittle melodrama, minimalistic lyricism, politically incisive expressionism, and a proto-absurdist work by Japan's master of prewar drama, Kishida Kunio.

Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places ...
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Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places center stage transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized and marginalized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that many of these so-called miscreants—treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, depraved poet-literati, and disloyal officials—were deemed so not because of a set of immutable social and religious norms, but by decisions and circumstances influenced by personal taste, contradictory value systems, and negotiations of political and social power.Less

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China

Published in print: 2017-08-31

Focusing on a diverse cast of characters and/or depraved actions polemicized by writers from the Spring and Autumn period (771-476 B.C.E.) through the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.), this volume places center stage transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized and marginalized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that many of these so-called miscreants—treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, depraved poet-literati, and disloyal officials—were deemed so not because of a set of immutable social and religious norms, but by decisions and circumstances influenced by personal taste, contradictory value systems, and negotiations of political and social power.

Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule ...
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Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945)? Questions about religion’s relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between colonialism, religion, and modernity in Korea. Yet, getting answers to these questions has been a challenge because of narrow historical investigations that fail to study religious processes in relation to political, economic, social, and cultural developments. In Building a Heaven on Earth, Albert L. Park’s studies the progressive drives by religious groups to contest standard conceptions of modernity and forge a heavenly kingdom on the Korean peninsula to relieve people from fierce ruptures in their everyday lives. The results of his study will reconfigure the debates on colonial modernity, the origins of faith-based social activism in Korea, and the role of religion in a modern world. Building a Heaven on Earth, in particular, presents a compelling story about the determination of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Presbyterian Church, and the Ch’ŏndogyo to carry out large-scale rural movements to form a paradise on earth anchored in religion, agriculture and a pastoral life. It is a transnational story of leaders from these three groups leaning on ideas and systems from countries, such as Denmark, France, Japan, and the United States, to help them reform political, economic, social and cultural structures in colonial Korea. This book shows that these religious institutions provided discursive and material frameworks that allowed for an alternative form of modernity that featured new forms of agency, social organization, and the nation. In so doing, Building a Heaven on Earth repositions our understandings of modern Korean history.Less

Building a Heaven on Earth : Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea

Albert L. Park

Published in print: 2014-12-31

Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945)? Questions about religion’s relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between colonialism, religion, and modernity in Korea. Yet, getting answers to these questions has been a challenge because of narrow historical investigations that fail to study religious processes in relation to political, economic, social, and cultural developments. In Building a Heaven on Earth, Albert L. Park’s studies the progressive drives by religious groups to contest standard conceptions of modernity and forge a heavenly kingdom on the Korean peninsula to relieve people from fierce ruptures in their everyday lives. The results of his study will reconfigure the debates on colonial modernity, the origins of faith-based social activism in Korea, and the role of religion in a modern world. Building a Heaven on Earth, in particular, presents a compelling story about the determination of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Presbyterian Church, and the Ch’ŏndogyo to carry out large-scale rural movements to form a paradise on earth anchored in religion, agriculture and a pastoral life. It is a transnational story of leaders from these three groups leaning on ideas and systems from countries, such as Denmark, France, Japan, and the United States, to help them reform political, economic, social and cultural structures in colonial Korea. This book shows that these religious institutions provided discursive and material frameworks that allowed for an alternative form of modernity that featured new forms of agency, social organization, and the nation. In so doing, Building a Heaven on Earth repositions our understandings of modern Korean history.

This study focuses on two primary arguments. First, it demonstrates how the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic or maligned nationality during the Tsarist and ...
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This study focuses on two primary arguments. First, it demonstrates how the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic or maligned nationality during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. Second, this study argues that the Soviet state was not free of Russian nationalist, populist and primordial views and influences in their nationalities (national minorities) policies. The aforementioned were the “Tsarist continuities” which blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal citizens. Instead, these influences cast the Koreans as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknowable political loyalties (and therefore, possible fifth columnists). This study found that the Soviet state exerted a tremendous sociopolitical influence on the Korean community primarily through the careful selection, cultivation, and placement of Soviet Korean cadres, informants, and secret police. Additionally, author Jon K. Chang sought to capture the sense of “agency,” initiative, and entrepreneurship that the Koreans added to Soviet life in the Russian Far East. Chang found very few documents of this type in the Soviet archives. Therefore, he went to Central Asia and interviewed over sixty elderly Soviet Korean deportees which he then paired with archival documents to write Burnt by the Sun.Less

Burnt by the Sun : The Koreans of the Russian Far East

Jon K. Chang

Published in print: 2016-06-30

This study focuses on two primary arguments. First, it demonstrates how the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic or maligned nationality during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. Second, this study argues that the Soviet state was not free of Russian nationalist, populist and primordial views and influences in their nationalities (national minorities) policies. The aforementioned were the “Tsarist continuities” which blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal citizens. Instead, these influences cast the Koreans as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknowable political loyalties (and therefore, possible fifth columnists). This study found that the Soviet state exerted a tremendous sociopolitical influence on the Korean community primarily through the careful selection, cultivation, and placement of Soviet Korean cadres, informants, and secret police. Additionally, author Jon K. Chang sought to capture the sense of “agency,” initiative, and entrepreneurship that the Koreans added to Soviet life in the Russian Far East. Chang found very few documents of this type in the Soviet archives. Therefore, he went to Central Asia and interviewed over sixty elderly Soviet Korean deportees which he then paired with archival documents to write Burnt by the Sun.

A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18th century. It explores the ...
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A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18th century. It explores the reason most Koreans, especially Confucian scholars and government officials, reacted negatively to Catholic ideas and practices, going so far as to launch an official persecution of Catholics that cost thousands of lives. To render visible the philosophical background to the anti-Catholic movement, this work includes a complete translation of an anti-Catholic essay written before the persecution began. However, it also examines those Koreans, many of whom were also Confucian scholars, who adopted Catholic beliefs and practices even before there were missionaries on the Korean peninsula. To aid in that investigation, it includes an annotated translation of the Silk Letter of Hwang Sayŏng, a first-person account of the persecution of 1801 relating why some Koreans became Catholics, why some later apostatized, and why others remained faithful to their new faith through torture and execution. In addition, it includes a discussion of Korea attitudes toward their nation and its place in the international order before the emergence of modern nationalism.Less

Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea

Don BakerFranklin Rausch

Published in print: 2017-05-31

A study of Korea’s first significant encounter with Western civilization, this work analyzes how Koreans reacted to Catholicism imported from China at the end of the 18th century. It explores the reason most Koreans, especially Confucian scholars and government officials, reacted negatively to Catholic ideas and practices, going so far as to launch an official persecution of Catholics that cost thousands of lives. To render visible the philosophical background to the anti-Catholic movement, this work includes a complete translation of an anti-Catholic essay written before the persecution began. However, it also examines those Koreans, many of whom were also Confucian scholars, who adopted Catholic beliefs and practices even before there were missionaries on the Korean peninsula. To aid in that investigation, it includes an annotated translation of the Silk Letter of Hwang Sayŏng, a first-person account of the persecution of 1801 relating why some Koreans became Catholics, why some later apostatized, and why others remained faithful to their new faith through torture and execution. In addition, it includes a discussion of Korea attitudes toward their nation and its place in the international order before the emergence of modern nationalism.

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the ...
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The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the modern Meiji state. Tokiko’s political activism combines focus and visionary flights of the imagination, nuancing our understanding of political consciousness among the non-elites in nineteenth-century Japan by blurring the line between rational and irrational and between discourse and action. Her use of prognostication, her appeals to the cosmic forces, and her conversations with ghosts illuminate original paths to female participation in the political debate of the late Tokugawa on one side, and resourceful ways to preserve identity in the face of modernity, science, and the onset of historical amnesia on the other. Tokiko’s story places the ordinary individual within the frame of large-scale history, squaring well-known historical moments with the private microcosm of a self-described “nobody.” By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji history.Less

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko : One Woman's Transit from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan

Laura Nenzi

Published in print: 2015-02-28

The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko is the story of a rural Mito woman – a political activist, oracle, poet, and teacher – whose life coincided with the late-Tokugawa crisis, the collapse of the shogunate, and the rise of the modern Meiji state. Tokiko’s political activism combines focus and visionary flights of the imagination, nuancing our understanding of political consciousness among the non-elites in nineteenth-century Japan by blurring the line between rational and irrational and between discourse and action. Her use of prognostication, her appeals to the cosmic forces, and her conversations with ghosts illuminate original paths to female participation in the political debate of the late Tokugawa on one side, and resourceful ways to preserve identity in the face of modernity, science, and the onset of historical amnesia on the other. Tokiko’s story places the ordinary individual within the frame of large-scale history, squaring well-known historical moments with the private microcosm of a self-described “nobody.” By putting an extra in the spotlight, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko offers a new script for the drama that unfolded on the stage of late-Tokugawa and early-Meiji history.

In the summer of 1123 Xu Jing travelled on a Chinese embassy ship to Koryŏ. As the secretary in charge of ritual affairs, he was uniquely qualified to observe and record the details of medieval ...
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In the summer of 1123 Xu Jing travelled on a Chinese embassy ship to Koryŏ. As the secretary in charge of ritual affairs, he was uniquely qualified to observe and record the details of medieval Korean society. He divided the work into 40 thematic chapters, each highlighting different aspects of Koryŏ, including its history, political organization, customs, food, local products, and clothing. It also includes a very detailed description of the travel route from Ningbo in China to the Yesŏng Harbor in Korea. Well known for its description of celadon and Korean mores, the information it presents can however not always be accepted uncritically. Besides a comprehensive and fully annotated scholarly translation of the original, this book therefore also includes an introduction that analyzes and contextualizes this important source.Less

Published in print: 2016-05-31

In the summer of 1123 Xu Jing travelled on a Chinese embassy ship to Koryŏ. As the secretary in charge of ritual affairs, he was uniquely qualified to observe and record the details of medieval Korean society. He divided the work into 40 thematic chapters, each highlighting different aspects of Koryŏ, including its history, political organization, customs, food, local products, and clothing. It also includes a very detailed description of the travel route from Ningbo in China to the Yesŏng Harbor in Korea. Well known for its description of celadon and Korean mores, the information it presents can however not always be accepted uncritically. Besides a comprehensive and fully annotated scholarly translation of the original, this book therefore also includes an introduction that analyzes and contextualizes this important source.

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an shaped literati identity and the collective imagination through its new relationship to the empire’s most prolific writers. They came through ...
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During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an shaped literati identity and the collective imagination through its new relationship to the empire’s most prolific writers. They came through its fold as examination candidates, sojourners, prospective officials, and as participants in pageantries and contests showcasing literary talent. As the central site of examination culture and social transformation, Chang’an emerged in prose narratives with a distinctive and newly formed metropolitan consciousness. In spatially evocative tales and anecdotes featuring literati protagonists, narratives demonstrate the ways in which Chang’an generated new domains of experience and added new perceptual categories to the Tang cultural imagination. In particular, these narratives explore the role of the literati as routine travelers, the interplay between literary prowess and sexual license, and the possibilities for extra-official promotion and unorthodox forms of valuation and livelihood. Because these explorations are subsumed under metropolitan, situational knowledge, they bring to our attention an unprecedented interval of social, existential, and geographical mobility maintained and reinforced by the spatial contiguities of urban space. City of Marvel and Transformation conceptualizes this literary phenomenon, and argues that such narratives amend our understanding of men of letters in between social identities and institutions, as they straddled anonymity and legitimacy.Less

City of Marvel and Transformation : Changan and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China

Linda Rui Feng

Published in print: 2015-07-31

During the Tang dynasty, the imperial capital of Chang’an shaped literati identity and the collective imagination through its new relationship to the empire’s most prolific writers. They came through its fold as examination candidates, sojourners, prospective officials, and as participants in pageantries and contests showcasing literary talent. As the central site of examination culture and social transformation, Chang’an emerged in prose narratives with a distinctive and newly formed metropolitan consciousness. In spatially evocative tales and anecdotes featuring literati protagonists, narratives demonstrate the ways in which Chang’an generated new domains of experience and added new perceptual categories to the Tang cultural imagination. In particular, these narratives explore the role of the literati as routine travelers, the interplay between literary prowess and sexual license, and the possibilities for extra-official promotion and unorthodox forms of valuation and livelihood. Because these explorations are subsumed under metropolitan, situational knowledge, they bring to our attention an unprecedented interval of social, existential, and geographical mobility maintained and reinforced by the spatial contiguities of urban space. City of Marvel and Transformation conceptualizes this literary phenomenon, and argues that such narratives amend our understanding of men of letters in between social identities and institutions, as they straddled anonymity and legitimacy.

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